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Remove Alliance Bank Looting & Cap Alliance Bank Amounts


Alex
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4 hours ago, Alex said:

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I understand why you want to make some changes since you don't like the "offshore idea", but honestly what you've presented here hurts alliances of all types. Take my alliance for example (TCW) we have around 1,500 cities total (Including offshores), with $400k per city that's $600m total cap. Back during the end of KF we were left with 38 members around 850 cities or a cap of around $260m. We spent $11b on rebuilding those 38 members, that's 43x the cap. Other top tier alliances like TKR, BK, NPO, t$ etc spent similar amounts, any cap unless its obscenely large just kills entirely the need to maintain a reserve and more importantly it kills the need to practice good financial management and ensure you plan to have enough in reserve to rebuild. A flat per city cap on reserves will not work, if you want to introduce a cap it must be scaling since larger tier alliances need far more to rebuild and grow than lower tier alliances. Poor old Grumpy would be destroyed by this cap since they barely get $350m cash in reserve, which is peanuts for them.

Also the FARK bank you linked is clearly an issue since its impossible to raid that, the difference with the other offshores is that people are active enough to make sure they juggle the bank between AA's so it doesn't get looted. Only in rare circumstances do people mess up enough to allow themselves to be beiged. 

3 hours ago, Akuryo said:

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Since you referenced us I'll answer your question. ;,p

I'd drop TCW taxes to 0/0, no point having a reserve so people can rebuild themselves. Also even if the cap was raised to 10x (So $6b) we'd be over it many times. This also hurts banks as well, since I'm not keeping Orion funds on my nation to allow it to be raided, so i'd be forced to choose between protecting my personal funds or banking funds. 

2 hours ago, Theodosius said:

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Excellent post BTW. Showcases how many potential problems this idea can bring about.

 

Edited by Sphinx
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My biggest question around these questions is that implementation would be incredibly complex as we already have alliances with much more than their cap in either their main bank or an offshore. 

How would that possible be implemented? Will it be that what currently exists will be grandfathered in? In which case people will just stock up their offshore in advance and then only pull out what they need basically allowing a level or circumvention. 

The alternative would be forcing the money out of the bank above the cap which would go into presumable the oldest leader or something along those lines. All that would do would allow raiders to know exactly who they need to hit and when to guarantee a lovey prize package and potentially globally derail alliance economies. 

The limits either would need to be high enough that they aren’t worthwhile, or there would need to be a way to manage the implementation without making it pointless to do so. 

That being said I don’t see a need for this sort of fix at all. If the issue is invulnerable offshores then make a limit for alliances, either score or city wise. If leaving an alliance would cause what remains to drop below it should ask for confirmation and if confirmed anything in the bank is transferred to the nation remaining (oldest seniority leader if multiple) and the alliance is dissolved.

Edit: The 1n growing bank cap is actually a pretty cool idea that requires alliances investment and makes offshores much more unsustainable. 

Edited by Timmy
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4 hours ago, Alex said:

Hello everyone,

This suggestion is inspired by the madness that is "offshore banks" and other gimmicks to avoid alliance bank looting. Alliance banks are obviously a very useful tool that we want to include in the game, but we also don't want to end raiding/looting by making their contents invulnerable. That was the inspiration behind the alliance bank looting mechanic (which doesn't often matter due to offshores, etc.)

In the status quo, we have banks like this https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=6045 with 0.00 score that are invulernable to raiding. I believe something needs to change so that we're not incentivizing this behavior in the game.

 

My proposal is twofold: first, we remove the alliance bank looting mechanic. Alliance banks would be invulnerable to being looted. Therefore, no one would need to make these "offshores." It would simplify alliance mechanics a great deal, and end all sorts of weird moderation issues and gimmicks that players would agree with me are unfair or against the spirit of the game.

Of course, we don't want to end raiding/looting. Therefore, as the second part of the suggestion, I am proposing a cap on alliance bank contents. This cap would be based on the number of cities in the alliance so as not to incentivize people to again make "offshores" to get around the bank limits. This restriction on total bank contents will require alliances to store more of their money/resources in their nations, such that they are still vulnerable to looting.

To come up with an idea for proposed caps, I pulled the alliance bank contents of all alliances with 40 or more members and compared it to the total number of cities of their members. I came up with a multiplier for each alliance (Cities * X = Bank Contents) and then using all of the calculated multipliers for each alliance, took the 75th percentile to be on the higher end. Then I did some small amounts of rounding to make for nice, pretty numbers.

These calculated figures would set an alliance bank contents cap for each resource:

  • Money: Cities * 400,000
  • Coal/Oil/Uranium: Cities * 15
  • Bauxite/Iron/Lead: Cities * 10
  • Steel/Aluminum/Gasoline/Munitions: Cities * 100
  • Food: Cities * 400

Total cities calculated would not include Vacation Mode nations, or Gray nations.

Per feedback, I agree these original proposed caps are way too low (they didn't factor in the offshore-stashed bank contents.) My intent is not to cap banks so low that they're unusable, but to find a reasonable balance between alliance bank/nation storage that doesn't eliminate the viability of raiding through removing alliance bank looting.

You can also see data from the last 10,000 bank loots here - on average, they're very little anyway. Removing bank looting isn't going to change much, most banks are de-facto unlootable anyway.

image.png
 

Another benefit of having caps on alliance banks is that it should make war cycles more regular. Commonly, alliances wait to stockpile resources before going to war. Limits on stockpiles will essentially set a cap on how long alliances should wait before going to war.

Also, basing resource caps on number of cities should make it more-or-less fair for all types of alliances, from high-city alliances with low members to low-city alliances with lots of members.

 

Let me know what you think, and of course the actual caps could be tweaked. But I think the concept behind this suggestion is good, and will improve gameplay and make things a bit more sensible.

 

EDIT: Another note: I'm just looking for feedback here, and perhaps tweaking of numbers. I'd like to run a long-term (2 month?) tournament on the test server with alliance banks enabled, looting disabled, and the caps in place before pushing a change like this to the live server.

 

 

This is an overreach not really a solution,  Also yes before any solutions are put into effect testing them on Test server first is a must

 

 

Ideas of the top...

1 - require a nation to be a certain NS range to create an AA keeping them above a certain range.  (2000 NS maybe)

 

2 - require certain number of nations in order to use bank functions (no more one man AA's with bank access )

 

3 - Limit bank to bank transfers to once per day

 

4 - Limit bank to outside non-members ??? per day (not sure amount but this restriction would not apply to members)

 

5 - limit nation AA changes to once per day

 

 

 

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
38 minutes ago, Dryad said:

Well, you shouldnt try to balance it around solo alliances. If alliance bank looting is removed then offshores will no longer be needed, so you need to look at the wealth of average alliance members to balance it. Your income is clearly not the norm in this game.

tho I agree the cash might be  a bit high the rest seems pretty normal, i think its still we have to have off shores and such

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Remove Bank looting; limiting it to $100m-$500m per City would be reasonable. Then maybe 100,000 of each resource per City. Food more.

No reason people should need to bounce their bank funds like a football to be competitive.

Edited by Noctis Anarch Caelum
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I think 5 pages of "no" is sufficient to answer how your OP suggestion would be received.

 

I personally think off-shores, bank alliances, etc add a cool dimension to the game. I say leave them as-is but make it so they need a minimum number of members or a minimum score to use.

This way they still have the "chance" to be looted but people can still utilize off-shores. I agree that a 0 score nation holding a bank is effectively an exploit of the game mechanics.

 

 

The reason off-shores are so important is because the war system is so broken. Money and resources need a place to hide or you'd just be constantly raided for your cash and never have a chance to grow.

Edited by Bartholomew Roberts
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If you can't build a proper warchest, and if you are forced to hold several months worth of resources and cash in your nation who the frick is going to want to fight ever? If every beige you take results in several weeks of economic damage the entire game is just going to turn into RnR. Nobody is going to want to fight if it's mechanically impossible to not take crippling losses from it.

Oh and that Fark 0 score bank you keep bandying about as your smoking gun really shows how out of touch you are buddy. Since the vast majority of Alliance banks are nations at regular scores forming 1 man AAs and reforming them when attacked.

Edited by Pop
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37 minutes ago, Zaxon said:

 

 

This is an overreach not really a solution,  Also yes before any solutions are put into effect testing them on Test server first is a must

 

 

Ideas of the top...

1 - require a nation to be a certain NS range to create an AA keeping them above a certain range.  (2000 NS maybe)

 

2 - require certain number of nations in order to use bank functions (no more one man AA's with bank access )

 

3 - Limit bank to bank transfers to once per day

 

4 - Limit bank to outside non-members ??? per day (not sure amount but this restriction would not apply to members)

 

5 - limit nation AA changes to once per day

 

 

 

Expanding on this I would put restrictions on Sending & Receiving  with outside transfers to AA banks and so you're only allowed to send once and receive once per day each.

- Also requiring someone with bank access to accept the transfer is must so the receiving bank can decide who they want to accept funds from for their limit.

 

This flexibility  allows people to still play with offshores but limit their usefulness with limited transfers and limits to AA hopping.

 

Looting the bank & off shores should still be a part of the war mechanics as having a level of tactical intrigue is what keeps wars interesting.  

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I've got a nice, unpopular opinion: I love this idea. This isn't an update, but a complete meta shift...and I think its one that is long term a good idea. Over the years, people have figured this game out to its core. Some have even gone so far as to make bots to automatically offshore the banks to avoid looting, figure out how many spies everyone has, etc. I think this is a good first step to changing how people cheese the game. I say change since, lets be honest, if there's a system, someone will abuse it no matter what. I think this will actually improve the game by providing incentive for shorter, more impactful wars. None of this winning by making the other side quit out of boredom nonsense we have today.

I don't speak for Grumpy, by my personal opinion is that Grumpy would actually be fine assuming the amount is weighted against cities. Large numbers of cities means large incomes even at low infra, and rebuilding isn't any harder unless you're going to high infra. Depending on the specifics of how bank size is weighted will affect how balanced. These amounts should be relatively stable, and not decrease quickly, so city count, land and, to a lesser extent, infra could be used to generate bank amounts. I can foresee a few different ways to balance:

 

Linear increase-  Bank total =  # of cities * X

Weighted by city cost-  Bank total = # of cities * average # of cities * X

Weighted by city and infra cost-  Bank total = # cities * average # of cities * 4^(average infra/2000) * X

 

I personally think resources should be linear while money should be weighted. I like the idea of weighting in some way by the average infra so that there's an incentive for a lot of infra, i.e. bank nations, while the natural risk is that they cost a lot and destroying infra means losing resources if they're not lootable. 

In terms of details as well, there are a lot of questions about what happens when your formula changes. In the above, that means infra, but in all formulae, banks are dependent on the number of cities. When someone leaves,  goes to grey after being beiged or goes to VM, it doesn't make sense to immediately deleting resources. I think you'd have to set a deadline before deletion so people have time to react to changes. I'd love to hear your thoughts, sheepy, on how you'd implement changes in bank caps.

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Hey Krampus, the signature edit is under account settings. Actually, here's the link.

https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/settings/signature/

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11 minutes ago, zigbigadorlou said:

I've got a nice, unpopular opinion: I love this idea. This isn't an update, but a complete meta shift...and I think its one that is long term a good idea. Over the years, people have figured this game out to its core. Some have even gone so far as to make bots to automatically offshore the banks to avoid looting, figure out how many spies everyone has, etc. I think this is a good first step to changing how people cheese the game. I say change since, lets be honest, if there's a system, someone will abuse it no matter what. I think this will actually improve the game by providing incentive for shorter, more impactful wars. None of this winning by making the other side quit out of boredom nonsense we have today.

I don't speak for Grumpy, by my personal opinion is that Grumpy would actually be fine assuming the amount is weighted against cities. Large numbers of cities means large incomes even at low infra, and rebuilding isn't any harder unless you're going to high infra. Depending on the specifics of how bank size is weighted will affect how balanced. These amounts should be relatively stable, and not decrease quickly, so city count, land and, to a lesser extent, infra could be used to generate bank amounts. I can foresee a few different ways to balance:

 

Linear increase-  Bank total =  # of cities * X

Weighted by city cost-  Bank total = # of cities * average # of cities * X

Weighted by city and infra cost-  Bank total = # cities * average # of cities * 4^(average infra/2000) * X

 

I personally think resources should be linear while money should be weighted. I like the idea of weighting in some way by the average infra so that there's an incentive for a lot of infra, i.e. bank nations, while the natural risk is that they cost a lot and destroying infra means losing resources if they're not lootable. 

In terms of details as well, there are a lot of questions about what happens when your formula changes. In the above, that means infra, but in all formulae, banks are dependent on the number of cities. When someone leaves,  goes to grey after being beiged or goes to VM, it doesn't make sense to immediately deleting resources. I think you'd have to set a deadline before deletion so people have time to react to changes. I'd love to hear your thoughts, sheepy, on how you'd implement changes in bank caps.

Your opinion is unpopular because everyone who doesn't use low taxes or has a massive alliance bank in offshore right now gets screwed by this. If they don't, then that means the cap is so high it's existence is pointless nonsense.

Don't get me wrong, politically i support all of the ancient power centers imploding into a violent diaspora. What a chaotic sight to behold. But the idea is to have them die, not everyone who uses higher tax die. 

This would have been a good idea when the game launches. It's an AIDs idea half a decade down the road where single alliances have more to their name than Alex imagined would ever even exist.

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Dude. heck no. Quit messing with our freedom in game. If someone wants to sacrifice their growth to be a vault, or bank teller, then let them. 

All this stunt is doing is appeasing players that want easy loot, and easier money control of the game.

With your proposal the monstrosity called Guinea Pigs becomes the new largest bank with their 500 membership. 

The game is fine. Make new innovations instead of limiting our fun.

sincerely, an Arrgh member.

Edited by Xea Evangelos
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Super dumb idea, Yakuza got looted for hundreds of millions of cash and resources in a few days, your average is just that low because it adds the smallest micros and their empty banks. Even the 0.1% loot NPO and BK banks give is larger than that. Bank loot does really stack up, i've talked with gov a couple times over how much loot our bank is losing, if you multiply it by hundreds of beiges, you'll find it's not a trivial amount at all. But what can you know, you don't play the game and just look at some very skewed statistics to decide what to do when you're too lazy to moderate.

And really, a 0-score nation who can't even play the game holding Fark's bank doesn't bother anyone.

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the way I see it, capping aa rss will only lead to more offshores. No, I think a better way to handle this prob is to limit aa's with less than 2-5 ppl in them to a cap (this would reduce the offshores) and that should cover it.Incentivize aa's to NOT offshore, possibly also make aa trades during an actual war impossible, so even if an aa does have offshore(s) they cant access them the entire time they are in a war

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Happy with making alliance banks un-lootable, capping on the other hand is absolutely bonkers and bears zero correlation with how the game is played.  Stop trying to make a game that is fundamentally about team work and co-operation a PvP, it is not.  The social and team dynamics of browser pol-sims are why the majority of people play these games, we sure as hell don't play it to compare spreadsheets with one another.

If you want to fix the game perhaps refer to the Cost of Winning thread, where I demonstrate that even though one side has been utterly annihilated, they are still net positive making money.  That is why wars go on for ever, there is no point in time where people are going backwards.

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My biggest issue with this is it would hurt the 3rd party banks such as bank of asgard or hogwarts bank. If you want a savings account it either goes to a nation or alliance bank and both can be looted. With caps you cant hold that much in savings in an alliance bank and if they kept it in the nation it can be raided and it limits to only 1 banker. Same thing with loans, if a bank has some money to loan they got to keep that somewhere.

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Bank looting was the flawed mechanic, not banking itself.

Either reevaluate how looting works or leave it alone. Don't completely undermine one of the functioning mechanics that is actually useful in the game.

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Think we should separate caps from the discussion & focus just on the loot mechanic. He might as well make them unlootable if keeps all the exploits to make them 100% unlootable 100% effective. So it’s a broken mechanic unless he makes it possible to prevent people from just sending out the funds.

I see it as either he fixes it, so blockades & other ways can potentially prevent people from emptying the bank before being beiged or he make them unlootable if fixing the mechanic is to much work. The caps aren’t needed.

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2 hours ago, Sketchy said:

Bank looting was the flawed mechanic, not banking itself.

Either reevaluate how looting works or leave it alone. Don't completely undermine one of the functioning mechanics that is actually useful in the game.

 

2 hours ago, Frawley said:

Happy with making alliance banks un-lootable, capping on the other hand is absolutely bonkers and bears zero correlation with how the game is played.  Stop trying to make a game that is fundamentally about team work and co-operation a PvP, it is not.  The social and team dynamics of browser pol-sims are why the majority of people play these games, we sure as hell don't play it to compare spreadsheets with one another.

If you want to fix the game perhaps refer to the Cost of Winning thread, where I demonstrate that even though one side has been utterly annihilated, they are still net positive making money.  That is why wars go on for ever, there is no point in time where people are going backwards.

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

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12 minutes ago, Alex said:

 

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

You can only really expect what they have on hand unless so inactive they don’t log in once. So wouldn’t matter in that regard.

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18 minutes ago, Alex said:

 

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

Yes, unsurprisingly killing either raiding or the insanely useful tool of alliance banking are both unimaginably unpopular. Who could possibly have predicted?

 

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